On Saturday afternoon, less than 24 hours before the start of the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season, mother nature decided to start on her own time as the first tropical cyclone emerged in the Atlantic Basin. During the course of the week, while Tropical Storm Alma formed in the tropical waters off the west coast of Costa Rica, there was another area of disturbed weather on the other side of Central America in the Western Caribbean. Over the next several days, this area became better organized, and developed into the first named storm of the Atlantic season at 1:00 PM EDT near the coast of Belize, formerly known as British Honduras.

The storm, which was named Arthur, eventually came ashore in the southern part of the Yucatan Peninsula in the areas of Chetumal, Mexico and Ciudad del Carmen. The storm, which was moving very slowly due to the lack of steering winds at the upper levels of the atmosphere, dragged itself along the plateau of the southern Yucatan for the next 24 hours or so, and brought with it, a tremendous amount of rain. While the rainfall amounts were not as high as those of its Eastern Pacific counterpart, Arthur’s torrential rains did produce between 5 to 10 inches of rainfall with some areas seeing 15 inches. By comparison, Arthur was a much weaker storm than Alma with maximum sustained winds only reaching tropical storm force of 40 miles per hour, and a minimum barometric pressure dropping to only 1005 millibars, or 29.68 inches of Hg (Mercury).

The storm is still chugging along, but as a Tropical Depression some 80 miles to the Southeast of Ciudad del Carmen in the southern Yucatan as of the 5:00 PM EDT Advisory from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. The forecast indicates that the depression is likely to weaken over the next 24 hours, and become a remnant low by the next advisory.